Curator: conceived and curated by Leipzig-based curator and artist Helmut Völter
Wolken im Luftmeer (Clouds in a sea of air) (cover) 1917
I desire (I feel that is the correct word) to own a copy of the above book. Has anyone got a one for sale?
Please let me know as I would love to own one!
Update: I now own a copy of Wolken im Luftmeer purchased from a lovely person in Germany 🙂
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Zurich for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Unknown photographer Wolkendecken, die ineinander übergehen. S.-Cu. und S., from: Wolken im Luftmeer (Merging cloud covers. S.-Cu. and S., from: Clouds in a sea of air) Photographs taken by German fighter pilots during WW1, Berlin, 1917
Unknown photographer Feine Schäfchen. Ci.-Cu, from: Wolken im Luftmeer (Delicate fluffy clouds. Ci.-Cu, from: Clouds in a sea of air) Photographs taken by German fighter pilots during WW1, Berlin, 1917
Unknown photographer Flying above a sea of clouds – altostratus from an aircraft (Plate Nr. 103 from: Wolken im Luftmeer / Clouds in a sea of air) Photographs taken by German fighter pilots during WW1, Berlin, 1917
Unknown photographer (Plate Nr. 90 from: Wolken im Luftmeer / Clouds in a sea of air) Photographs taken by German fighter pilots during WW1, Berlin, 1917
The English pharmacist and meteorologist Luke Howard wrote in 1802 in the preface to his manuscript On the Modification of Clouds: “Clouds are subject to certain distinct modifications, produced by the general causes which affect all the variations of the atmosphere; they are commonly as good visible indicators of the operation of these causes, as is the countenance of the state of a person’s mind or body.” Eighty years later, meteorologists had still not reached a consensus on how to classify, label, and read the forms of clouds. It was during this time that scientists first began using photography to record and measure clouds. With its help, they attempted to gain precise and accurate images that would provide insight on the interplay between clouds and the atmosphere and which could be used to create and convey a classification of cloud forms.
The exhibition CLOUD STUDIES – The Scientific View of the Sky presents six stages of meteorological cloud photography, from its infancy in the 1880s – in Switzerland with the first images by Albert Riggenbach photographed from Mount Säntis – up to the newspaper images in the United States that were captured by the first weather satellites in the 1960s. At the beginning of the 20th century, cloud formations and cloud systems were investigated foremost by the military and led to fundamental insights into interrelated weather situations.
CLOUD STUDIES – The Scientific View of the Sky is a rich collection of photographs, notes, records and atlases from diverse research sources and depicts the origins of contemporary weather forecasting. Each of the six parts of the exhibition represents a different scientific and photographic view of clouds while reflecting on the “history of the gaze” as well as the history of the medium with its various photographic mechanisms and reproductive technologies.
An additional theme running throughout the exhibition is the development of science and its varying ideas about clouds. The protagonists and working methods change over time – from the ambitious, wealthy amateur Ralph Abercromby to the anonymous teams of weather satellite technicians. Whereas Riggenbach still wished to capture images of ideal cloud types, the view of the cloud constellations and their chaotic systems expands with the introduction of film, at the latest, and with the constant recording and measuring capacities of digital cameras, which transmit images to earth, where they are evaluated and publicised.
Conceived by curator Helmut Völter (Leipzig), the exhibition CLOUD STUDIES – The Scientific View of the Sky explores the question as to how all these changes influenced the intentions, concepts, and technical developments associated with images of the clouds. It shows how similar or dissimilar photographs of clouds can be, when photographed according to individual specifications. Ultimately it is left to the viewer to decide if and how scientific cloud photography differs from related and frequently published motifs from the history of art and photography.
Press release from the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Zurich website
Foam presents Black Passport, a project by and about the American conflict photographer Stanley Greene (New York, 1949-2017). Black Passport shows photos of conflicts and disasters combined with photos of Greene’s private life. The result is a revealing portrait of a photographer who is addicted to the adrenaline rush of being on the move, but at the same time realises the sacrifices he makes in his personal life. Stanley Greene has photographed in regions such as Chechnya, Iraq, Rwanda and Sudan and is one of the founders of the international photo agency NOOR.
Every day, newspapers and magazines are filled with photos of war, oppression and violence. The photographer that enables us to watch what is happening in the rest of the world from the safety of our own homes, however, usually remains invisible. This is not the case in Black Passport, the biography of war photographer Stanley Greene, which appeared in book form in 2009 and will be exhibited in Foam starting on 16 December. Photos of conflict and disaster regions such as Rwanda, Sudan, Chechnya and Iraq are alternated with photos from the private life of Stanley Greene: photos of Paris and many women. Slide shows will also be presented, interspersed with texts from the book. Greene’s voice resounds through the exhibition space – he is disconcertingly frank: ‘I think you can only keep positive for eight years. If you stay at it longer than that, you turn. And not into a beautiful butterfly.’
Just as Stanley Greene, visitors to the exhibition are poised between the safety of Western life and the horrors of foreign wars. And it is precisely this juxtaposition that causes these photos to stir us more than the stream of bad-news images that inundate us daily. In addition, Black Passport is a fascinating story about what it is like to be a war photographer. Why does someone choose to be continually confronted with death and misery? Is it an escape from everyday reality and a craving for adventure?
Short Biography
Stanley Greene has photographed in the former Soviet Union, Central America, Asia and the Middle East. His work has appeared in publications including Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine, Stern and Paris Match. He has won various World Press Awards and in 2004 the W. Eugene Smith Award. Open Wound: Chechnya 1994-2003 was published in 2004 and his book Black Passport in 2009. Greene is one of the founders of the Amsterdam-based international photo agency NOOR.
“I think you can only do this for eight years. For eight years you can still keep the positive. If you stay at it longer than eight years, you turn. And not into a beautiful butterfly. You really turn. I see it in myself, I see it in all my friends and colleagues. I mean they are all victims of post trauma. We’re not the beautiful butterflies anymore. We become moths. We’re like moths flying to the flame.You know, sometimes your wings get singed or you just burn up. Get killed. Or you burn up inside.The drugs and the alcohol and the party and all of this is to push it away, push it away.”
“I’m an observer, I’m not an objective observer though, but I’m an observer. I feel it’s very important for journalists to go to these hell holes and photograph or write or do radio or whatever because I still believe that the public wants to know.”
Stanley Greene
Stanley Greene(American, 1949-2017)
Stanley Greene (February 14, 1949 – May 19, 2017) was an American photojournalist.
Greene was born to middle class parents in Brooklyn. Both his parents were actors. His father, who was born in Harlem, was a union organiser, one of the first African Americans elected as an officer in the Screen Actors Guild,and belonged to the Harlem Renaissance movement. Greene’s father was blacklisted as a Communist in the 1950s and forced to take uncredited parts in movies. Greene’s parents gave him his first camera when he was eleven years old.
Greene began his art career as a painter, but started taking photos as a means of cataloging material for his paintings. In 1971, when Greene was a member of the anti-Vietnam War movement and the Black Panther Party, his friend photographer W. Eugene Smith offered him space in his studio and encouraged him to study photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York and the San Francisco Art Institute.
Greene held various jobs as a photographer, including taking pictures of rock bands and working at Newsday. In 1986, he shot fashion photographs in Paris. He called himself a “dilettante, sitting in cafes, taking pictures of girls and doing heroin”. After a friend died of AIDS, Greene kicked his drug habit and began to seriously pursue a photography career.
He began photojournalism in 1989, when his image (“Kisses to All, Berlin Wall”) of a tutu-clad girl with a champagne bottle became a symbol of the fall of the Berlin Wall. While working for the Paris-based photo agency Agence Vu in October 1993, Greene was trapped and almost killed in the White House in Moscow during a stand-off between President Boris Yeltsin and the parliament. He covered the war-torn countries Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Iraq, Somalia, Croatia, Kashmir, and Lebanon. He took pictures of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and the US Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
After 1994, Greene was best known for his documentation of the conflict in Chechnya, between rebels and the Russian Armed Forces, which was compiled in his 2004 book, Open Wound. These photos drew attention to the “suffering that has marked the latest surge in Chechnya’s centuries-long struggle for independence from Russia”.
In 2008, Greene revealed that he had hepatitis C, which he believed he had contracted from a contaminated razor while working in Chad in 2007. After controlling the disease with medication, he traveled to Afghanistan and photographed a story about “the crisis of drug abuse and infectious disease”.
Stanley Greene co-founded NOOR Agency with Kadir van Lohuizen in 2007. They launched their agency with their colleagues on the 7th of September 2007 at Visa Pour L’Image. Greene died in Paris, at the age of 68. He had been undergoing treatment for liver cancer.
Black Passport is the biography of war photographer Stanley Greene, compiled out of hours of interviews by Teun van der Heijden. It shows Stanley’s war images alternated with private images.
Teun van der Heijden: “Black Passport started as any other photo book project. At the beginning Stanley did let me know that he was up for ‘something completely different’. While working on the project we had a lot of conversations in which I discovered that there were a lot of similarities between Stanley and me. What is it then that one person becomes a designer, living happily with the same woman for 25 years, being a father of two daughters and the other person becomes a war photographer. This question was the beginning of a series of interviews. Out of the interviews came Black Passport. Black Passport is nominated several times. Some people believe it is the most important photo book of 2010.
A fabulous posting, with memorable thoughts and photographs!
These archetypal images have become deeply embedded in the collective conscience where conscience is pre-eminently the organ of sentiments and representations. The snap, snap, snap of the shutter evinces the flaws of human nature, reveals the presence of a quality or feeling to which we can all relate.
As Arbus states, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. And more complicated. That is why these photographs always capture our attention – because we become, we inhabit, we are the subject.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Jeu de Paume for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“There are and have been and will be an infinite number of things on earth. Individuals all different, all wanting different things, all knowing different things, all loving different things, all looking different. Everything that has been on earth has been different from any other thing. That is what I love: the differentness, the uniqueness of all things and the importance of life… I see something that seems wonderful; I see the divineness in ordinary things.”
Diane Arbus. Paper on Plato, senior English seminar, Fieldston School, November 28, 1939
“I want to photograph the considerable ceremonies of our present because we tend while living here and now to perceive only what is random and barren and formless about it. While we regret that the present is not like the past and despair of its ever becoming the future, its innumerable inscrutable habits lie in wait for their meaning. I want to gather them, like somebody’s grandmother putting up preserves, because they will have been so beautiful.
There are the Ceremonies of Celebration (the Pageants, the Festivals, the Feasts, the Conventions) and the Ceremonies of Competition (Contests, Games, Sports), the Ceremonies of Buying and Selling, of Gambling, of the Law and the Show; the Ceremonies of Fame in which the Winners Win and the Lucky are Chosen or Family Ceremonies or Gatherings (the Schools, the Clubs, the Meetings). Then they are Ceremonial Places (The Beauty Parlor, The Funeral Parlor or, simply The Parlor) and Ceremonial Costumes (what waitresses wear, or Wrestlers), Ceremonies of the Rich, like the Dog Show, and of the Middle Class, like the Bridge Game. Or, for example: the Dancing Lesson, the Graduation, the Testimonial Dinner, the Séance, the Gymnasium and the Picnic, and perhaps the Waiting Room, the Factory, the Masquerade, the Rehearsal, the Initiation, the Hotel Lobby and the Birthday Party. The etcetera.
I will write whatever is necessary for the further description and elucidation of these Rites and I will go wherever I can to find them.
These are our symptoms and our monuments. I want simply to save them, for what is ceremonious and curious and commonplace will be legendary.”
Diane Arbus. “American Rites, Manners and Customs,” Plan for a Photographic Project, Guggenheim proposal
“They are the proof that something was there and no longer is. Like a stain. And the stillness of them is boggling. You can turn away but when you come back they’ll still be there looking at you.”
Diane Arbus in response to request for a brief statement about photographs, March 15, 1971
Diane Arbus (New York, 1923-1971) revolutionised the art she practiced. Her bold subject matter and photographic approach produced a body of work that is often shocking in its purity, in its steadfast celebration of things as they are. Her gift for rendering strange those things we consider most familiar, and for uncovering the familiar within the exotic, enlarges our understanding of ourselves.
Arbus found most of her subjects in New York City, a place that she explored as both a known geography and as a foreign land, photographing people she discovered during the 1950s and 1960s. She was committed to photography as a medium that tangles with the facts. Her contemporary anthropology – portraits of couples, children, carnival performers, nudists, middle-class families, transvestites, zealots, eccentrics, and celebrities – stands as an allegory of the human experience, an exploration of the relationship between appearance and identity, illusion and belief, theatre and reality.
In this first major retrospective in France, Jeu de Paume presents a selection of two hundred photographs that affords an opportunity to explore the origins, scope, and aspirations of a wholly original force in photography. It includes all of the artist’s iconic photographs as well as many that have never been publicly exhibited. Even the earliest examples of her work demonstrate Arbus’s distinctive sensibility through the expression on a face, someone’s posture, the character of the light, and the personal implications of objects in a room or landscape. These elements, animated by the singular relationship between the photographer and her subject, conspire to implicate the viewer with the force of a personal encounter.
Biography
Diane Arbus was born in New York City on March 14, 1923, and attended the Ethical Culture and Fieldston Schools. At the age of eighteen she married Allan Arbus. Although she first started taking pictures in the early 1940s and studied photography with Alexey Brodovitch in 1954, it was not until 1955-1957, while enrolled in courses taught by Lisette Model, that she began to seriously pursue the work for which she has come to be known.
Her first published photographs appeared in Esquire in 1960 under the title The Vertical Journey. From that point on she continued to work intermittently as a free-lance photographer for Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, Show, The London Sunday Times, and a number of other magazines, doing portraits on assignment as well as photographic essays, for several of which she wrote accompanying articles.
During the 1950s, like most of her contemporaries, she had been using a 35mm camera, but in 1962 she began working with a 6×6 Rolleiflex. She once said, in accounting for the shift, that she had grown impatient with the grain and wanted to be able to decipher in her pictures the actual texture of things. The 6×6 format contributed to the refinement of a deceptively simple, formal, classical style that has since been recognised as one of the distinctive features of her work.
She received Guggenheim Fellowships in 1963 and 1966 for projects on “American Rites, Manners and Customs” and spent several summers during that period traveling across the United States, photographing contests, festivals, public and private gatherings, people in the costumes of their professions or avocations, the hotel lobbies, dressing rooms and living rooms she had described as part of “the considerable ceremonies of our present.” “These are our symptoms and our monuments,” she wrote in her original application. “I want simply to save them, for what is ceremonious and curious and commonplace will be legendary.”
The photographs she produced in those years attracted a great deal of attention when a selected group of them were exhibited, along with the work of two other photographers, in the 1967 “New Documents” show at the Museum of Modern Art. Nonetheless, although several institutions subsequently purchased examples of her work for their permanent collections, her photographs appeared in only two other major exhibitions during her lifetime, both of them group shows.
In the late 1960s she taught photography courses at Parsons School of Design, the Rhode Island School of Design and Cooper Union and in 1971 gave a master class at Westbeth, the artists cooperative in New York City where she then lived. During the same period she initiated the concept and did the basic research for the Museum of Modern Art’s 1973 exhibition on news photography, “From the Picture Press.”
She made a portfolio of ten photographs in 1970, printed, signed and annotated by her, which was to be the first of a series of limited editions of her work. She committed suicide on July 26, 1971 at the age of forty-eight. The following year the ten photographs in her portfolio became the first work of an American photographer to be exhibited at the Venice Biennale.
In the course of a career that may be said to have lasted little more than fifteen years, she produced a body of work whose style and content have secured her a place as one of the most significant and influential photographers of our time. The major retrospective mounted by the Museum of Modern Art in 1972 was attended by more than a quarter of a million people in New York before it began its tour of the United States and Canada. The Aperture monograph Diane Arbus, published in conjunction with the show has sold over 300,000 copies. Beginning in 2003, Diane Arbus Revelations, an international retrospective organised by The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art travelled to museums throughout the United States and Europe between 2003 and 2006. Major exhibitions devoted exclusively to her work have toured much of the world including, Australia, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, and the United Kingdom.
“There’s a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they’ll go through a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.”
“If you’ve ever talked to somebody with two heads you know they know something you don’t.”
The Gap between Attention and Affect
“You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw. It’s just extraordinary that we should have been given these peculiarities. And, not content with what we were given, we create a whole other set. Our whole guise is like giving a sign to the world to think of us in a certain way but there’s a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can’t help people knowing about you. And that has to do with what I’ve always called the gap between intention and effect. I mean if you scrutinise reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic.”
Other Thoughts
“The thing that’s important to know is that you never know. You’re always sort of feeling your way.”
“Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It’s what I’ve never seen before that I recognise.”
“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.”
“For me the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. And more complicated. I do have a feeling for the print but I don’t have a holy feeling for it. I really think what it is, is what it’s about. I mean it has to be of something. And what it’s of it always more remarkable than what it is.”
“I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them.”
Another photographer who is getting more recognition. Out of the work I have seen the portraits are the strongest. Some of them feel like precursors to the confronting portraits of women made by Diane Arbus while others offer a more reflective, contemplative examination of human presence.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Alicia Colen for her help and to the Howard Greenberg Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting.
Howard Greenberg Gallery is proud to present the recently discovered work of street photographer, Vivian Maier (1926-2009), from the Maloof Collection.
A nanny by trade, Vivian Maier’s street and travel photography was discovered by John Maloof in 2007 at a local auction house in Chicago. Always with a Rolleiflex around her neck, she managed to amass more than 2,000 rolls of films, 3,000 prints and more than 100,000 negative which were shared with virtually no one in her lifetime. Her black and white photographs-mostly from the 50s and 60s-are indelible images of the architecture and street life of Chicago and New York. She rarely took more than one frame of each image and concentrated on children, women, the elderly, and indigent. The breadth of Maier’s work also reveals a series of striking self-portraits as well as prints from her travels to Egypt, Bangkok, Italy, and the American Southwest, among dozens of other international cities.
“My fascination with her story has only grown, as has my involvement with her photographs. It is such an unusual story with no resolution. At first her images are extremely well seen, quality photographs of life on the street, in New York City and Chicago. But as one looks at the body of her work, she reveals her deeper interests. Then one tries to imagine who she was, what motivated her, her personality. It is not everyday that one becomes so involved and even obsessed with a particular photographer,” comments Howard Greenberg.
What little is known about Maier’s life is the result of John Maloof’s extensive research. He discovered her obituary on line in 2009 which was just the beginning of his investigative work. An American of French and Austro-Hungarian extraction, Maier split her time between Europe and the US, returning to NY in 1951. In 1956, she ultimately settled in Chicago where she worked as nanny for more than forty years. For a brief period in the 1970s she worked as a nanny to journalist, Phil Donahue’s children. Towards the end of her life, Maier was supported by the children she had cared for in the early 50s. Unbeknownst to them, one of Maier’s storage lockers (containing her massive group of negatives) was auctioned off due to delinquent payments.
After purchasing the first collection of Maier photographs in 2007, Maloof acquired more from another buyer at the same auction. He has since established the Maloof Collection to promote the work of Vivian Maier and to safeguard the archive for future generations. The archive consists of approximately 100,000 to 150,000 negatives; over 3,000 prints; hundreds of rolls of film; home movies; audio tape interviews, and other items representing roughly 90% of Maier’s work. Through Maloof’s efforts, Vivian Maier’s photographs have been exhibited internationally and have received significant critical attention. In November, Powerhouse Books will publish Vivian Maier: Street Photographer, edited by Maloof with a foreword by Geoff Dyer. John Maloof is also co-producing a documentary about Vivian Maier.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Self-portrait in Punk Jacket 1991-1992 Silver gelatin print
I am scanning my negatives made during the years 1991-1997 to preserve them in the form of an online archive as a process of active memory, so that the images are not lost forever. These photographs were images of my life and imagination at the time of their making, the ideas I was thinking about and the people and things that surrounded me.
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a vintage 8″ x 10″ silver gelatin print costs $700 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my Store web page.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Marcus Sucking His Thumb 1991-1992 Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Marcus in his Punk Jacket, Punt Road, South Yarra 1991-1992 Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Marcus as The Fool (posing for the sculptor Fredrick White) 1991-1992 Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Nude, in the Flat, Rear of Derelict House, 455, Punt Road, South Yarra 1992 Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Self-portrait, nude with the mural ‘Two boys on a car’ 1992 Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Nude on Floor (with Clifford Last) 1992 Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Nude on Couch, Punt Road, South Yarra 1992 Silver gelatin print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Nude on Couch, Punt Road, South Yarra 1992 Silver gelatin print
Curator: Michal Raz-Russo, museum exhibition coordinator and associate curator
Many thankx to The Art Institute of Chicago for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Artist unknown (American) [Three women] c. 1930s Gelatin silver print 8.9 x 14.7cm The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Artist unknown (American) The Three Graces c. 1930s Gelatin silver print The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Artist unknown (American) Look Pleasant c. 1910s Gelatin silver print 8.9 x 8.6cm The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Artist unknown (American) [Three women] c. 1910s Gelatin silver print 11.6 x 6.8cm The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Artist unknown (American) Untitled 1910/1940 Image: 7.7 x 5.2cm (3 1/16 x 2 1/16 in.) Paper: 8.6 x 6.1 cm (3 7/16 x 2 7/16 in.) The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
After George Eastman introduced the handheld Kodak #1 camera in 1888, amateurs made millions of snapshots depicting friends and family, travels, and festive occasions such as weddings. Even while solidifying such thoroughly conventional behaviours, amateur photography developed a new pictorial language that privileged immediacy, spontaneity, and accident. Career photographers and art historians – but also antiques vendors and flea-market shoppers – have long recognised the value of the “snapshot aesthetic.” The rise of social media and smartphones in recent years has effectively ended the era of the snapshot as both a printed photograph and an image for a private audience.
Text from the Art Institute of Chicago website
Artist unknown (American) Untitled (Summer, Aug, 1920) 1920 Gelatin silver print 13.9 x 8.3cm (5 1/2 x 3 5/16 in.) The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Artist unknown (American) Untitled c. 1920-1929 Gelatin silver print 13.7 x 8.5cm (5 7/16 x 3 3/8 in.) The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
This exhibition explores the early years of vernacular photography through graceful snapshots of female trios. Displaying more than 500 “found” images the exhibition features photographs of celebrations, vacations, and gatherings of family and friends are taken and kept with the aim of preserving moments in life for future generations. What happens, however, when a snapshot becomes an image “type” – transferred into the hands of a collector and folded into a broader cultural history?
This subject is explored in the Art Institute of Chicago’s The Three Graces – on view October 29, 2011, through January 22, 2012, in the museum’s Photography Galleries 3 and 4. The exhibition, featuring a private collection of more than 500 anonymous images depicting female trios, spans nearly a century of female role-playing for the camera. These mostly American “found” photographs, spanning from the 1890s to the 1970s, collectively reveal a great deal about the evolving ritual of women’s self-presentation, a theme already idealised in Classical culture with depictions of “The Three Graces.”
New York collector Peter J. Cohen, who has spent decades scouring flea markets, shops, and galleries in search of rare amateur photographs, amassed this image collection and gave it its title. Cohen was struck by the frequency of images featuring female trios, and had the wit to identify in them a playful echo of the Greek muses Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thalia, who are said to personify beauty, charm, and grace in both nature and humanity. Cohen owns some 20,000 anonymous snapshots spanning from the late 19th century until the 1970s. He has organised his mountainous holdings according to many classifications, among them “Double Exposures,” “Up on The Roof,” and “Dangerous Women.”
For Art Institute exhibition coordinator Michal Raz-Russo, who also authored the accompanying book, the “three graces” theme serves as a frame through which to chart shifts and continuities in women’s self-understanding across nearly a century. The 1888 introduction of the Kodak #1 camera and the 1900 debut of the Kodak Brownie made photography immensely popular, with much of the marketing was directed at women. Modern life and leisure in the 1920s coincided with the arrival of smaller cameras, faster film speeds, and automatic exposures; women of the expanding middle class became practiced at self-portraiture while vacationing or camping on their own. Later, in the mid-20th century, a clear convergence can be seen between women’s self-portraits and ideals of womanhood promulgated in films and glossy magazines. Throughout this history, men are clearly at work too, convincing women to participate in erotic poses according to another set of visual models. While the varieties of picturing and self-picturing are complex, The Three Graces demonstrates that women worked to define themselves as social beings through photography.
Visitors to the exhibition can find information on individual snapshots – gleaned from inscriptions and the clues provided by clothing and setting – at a special computer kiosk located in the gallery.
Press release from The Art Institute of Chicago website
Artist unknown (American) [Three Women] c. 1920s Gelatin silver print 13.5 x 8.3cm The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown Maker (American) Untitled (Stamped Clyde Banks Photo Services, Crystal Sheer, Aug 5 1932) 1930-1939 Gelatin silver print Paper: 11.7 x 7.1cm (4 5/8 x 2 13/16 in.) The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown Maker (American) Untitled (Stony Creek Dude Ranch, July 1939, stamped Certified, Master Photo Finishers of America, Fountain Photo Service, May 15 1940) Made 1939 Gelatin silver print Paper: 11.6 x 7cm (4 5/8 x 2 13/16 in.) The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown Maker (American) Untitled (Stamped Master Photo Finishers of America, Service and Quality, Kay Tone 10 Point Process, Certified Reg. U.S. Pat Off., Caton Photo Co., Detroit, Michigan, Sep 11 1939) Printed 1939 Gelatin silver print Paper: 10.7 x 7.9cm (4 1/4 x 3 1/8 in.) The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Artist unknown (American) [Three Women] c. 1940s Gelatin silver print 11.7 x 7cm The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Artist unknown (American) [Three Women and a photographer] c. 1940s Gelatin silver print 12.2 x 7.6cm The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown Maker (American) Untitled (Gym Teachers Linda “Sissy” House, Sarah Beth Jordan, Seanne Livingston, 9th Grade) Printed 1961 Gelatin silver print Paper: 9 x 9 cm (3 9/16 x 3 9/16 in.) The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown Maker (American) Untitled 1960-1969 Internal dye diffusion transfer print Paper: 10.8 x 8.9cm (4 5/16 x 3 9/16 in.) The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Martin M. Homburger (American, active mid-20th century) Untitled [Three women] 1967 Chromogenic print Image: 11.7 x 9.2cm (4 5/8 x 3 5/8 in.) Paper: 12.7 x 10.2cm (5 x 4 1/16 in.) The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown Maker (American) Untitled Printed 1968 Chromogenic print Paper: 9 x 8.6cm (3 9/16 x 3 7/16 in.) The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Artist unknown (American) [Three Women] c. 1930s Gelatin silver print 14.5 x 8.7cm The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Peter J. Cohen
The Three Graces: Snapshots of Twentieth-Century Women book cover Hardcover – November 29, 2011
Featuring an amazing treasure trove of unpublished images, this intriguing and entertaining book looks at how women explored their identity through popular photography in the 20th century
Snapshots preserve more than individual likeness and memory. Photographs of celebrations, vacations, and gatherings of family and friends are collected with the aim of constructing and preserving a personal identity for future generations. What happens, however, when a snapshot is subsequently discarded or displaced and becomes merely an “anonymous” image? This and many other questions are discussed in this fascinating selection of anonymous images depicting three women. Presumably all taken by nonprofessionals, these snapshots were acquired over time by a private collector interested in their eclectic yet familiar details, who named the grouping after the iconic Greco-Roman motif.
In traditional western iconography, the Three Graces personify beauty, charm, and grace in both nature and humanity. In the 150 snapshots assembled here, the remarkable consistency of confidence and poise projected by the trios of women – in varied settings, in various states of dress/undress, and over a period of more than fifty years – reveals the formal and behavioral conventions that evolved as photography’s popularity skyrocketed among amateurs. To this end, the iconography of The Three Graces provides a framework for understanding the generational differences and cultural influences that shaped women’s self-presentation in front of the camera in the first half of the 20th century.
Exhibition dates: 15th November, 2011 – 15th April, 2012
Curator: in-house touring exhibition by the National Archives of Australia
Many thankx to The Victorian Archives Centre for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Unknown photographer (Australian) Waves breaking into the pool 1945 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) 1952 Miss Pacific finalists Mary Clifton, Pamela Jansen and Judy Worrad, stand in front of surfboards on Bondi Beach, Sydney 1952 National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Sunbathing, Sydney Beach, NSW c. 1955 National Archives of Australia
Cossies, togs and bathers
Until the 1940s, Australian women wore decidedly modest, albeit colourful, one-piece swimsuits. But the bikini was already in vogue overseas and by the early 1950s Australian women were daring to wear it. Discover the many fashion statements that could be made by wearing a favourite pair of cossies, togs or bathers!
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Christmas party on Bondi Beach, Sydney 1959 National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Santa Claus visits a Sydney beach 1969 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
At the beach
In the 1950s and 1960s, Christmas heralded the start of annual summer holidays for many Australian families. Those who didn’t already live near the coast usually headed towards it, mostly in Holdens and sometimes hauling a caravan. They made tracks to seaside places such as the Gold Coast, Manly, Byron Bay and Sorrento, plonking their bodies on the warm sand, transistors to their ears, to bake in the summer sun. Back then most people seemed unconcerned about sunburn and, as the images show, even beach umbrellas were in short supply.
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Bathing beauty 1955 Australian Travel Industry Association collection National Archives of Australia
This image comes from the Australian Travel Industry Association collection, now held in the National Archives. This series consists of black and white prints and negatives of photographs used in publications, notably Walkabout magazine, produced by the Australian National Travel Association (ANTA).
The Victorian Archives Centre plays host to regular displays of original records from our collection as well as touring exhibitions about Victorian stories. Over Summer, the Victorian Archives Centre will present Summers Past: Golden Days in the Sun 1950-1970, a fascinating photographic exhibition highlighting Australia’s fascination with the sun and sea.
Summers Past will explore our enduring love affair of all things summer, invoking memories of carefree sunny days at the beach in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. This is your last chance to view this exhibition before it returns to the National Archives of Australian in April 2012.
So slip on your cossie, slop on the sunscreen and head down to the Victorian Archives Centre this summer!
Summers Past: Golden Days in the Sun 1950-1970 will be on display until April 2012. Entry is free.
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Sunbathers relax under a low umbrella at Bondi, NSW 1956 National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Sydney beach scene 1969 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Surfer and bikini girl on the sand 1969 National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Holiday makers at Surfers Paradise 1959 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Snack bar, Surfers Paradise, QLD 1971 National Archives of Australia
Out and about
Australians have always been fairly laid back and never more so than in summer. Looking at these images from the 1950s and 1960s, it’s plain that sophistication was seldom a consideration when choosing what to wear. On holidays, most people preferred to be comfortable rather than trendy, and bare feet were common on coastal streets, as were unbuttoned shirts and even swimwear.
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Holiday makers gather around a car on a hot summer’s day 1964 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Surf lifesaving, Bondi Beach 1960 National Archives of Australia
Cliff Bottomley (Australian, c. 1907-1981) Preparing canoes 1948 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
This image comes from the Australian News and Information Bureau collection, now held in the National Archives. This vast archival resource is the legacy of nearly half a century’s work by Bureau photographers who captured hundreds of thousands of photographs of Australians at work and play.
Cooling off
It’s no secret that Australia can be very hot, especially in summer. As the song says, we are girt by sea, and for 85 per cent of Australians a blissful dip in the ocean has always been less that two hours’ drive away. For those living further inland, sanctuary was found in a nearby river or lake, or the town’s public swimming pool.
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Harbour swimming pool, Manly, New South Wales 1960 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
This image comes from the Australian News and Information Bureau collection, now held in the National Archives. This vast archival resource is the legacy of nearly half a century’s work by Bureau photographers who captured hundreds of thousands of photographs of Australians at work and play.
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Sunbathers relax on the lawn at the Olympic Pool, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory 1966 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Surf board riders, Torquay, VIC 1967 National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Children learning to swim 1945 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
Nice one, sport!
Between 1950 and 1970, Australia was triumphant in all the sports we loved. We dominated in the pool, won the Davis Cup a remarkable 15 times, and boasted an impressive record against every Test cricket nation. As these images show, Australian youngsters were keen to play the game, and on most summer Saturdays all around the country, boys and girls would play tennis or cricket, or swim like champions.
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Boys with kites 1965 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Surf carnival 1966 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
Anonymous photographer (Australian) Mass tennis class 1967 Australian News and Information Bureau collection National Archives of Australia
The Victorian Archives Centre 99 Shiel Street North Melbourne, Victoria 3051 Australia
Curators: co-organised with the National Gallery of Canada and curated by Dr. David Franklin (then Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the National Gallery of Canada) and Dr. Sebastian Schütze (Professor of Art History at the University of Vienna)
Simon Vouet (French, 1590-1649) The Fortune Teller c. 1620 Oil on canvas National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Observe if you will:
1/ The treatment of the background behind Boy Bitten by a Lizard (1594-1596)
2/ The tension of the hands in this painting
3/ The pallor of the skin of Sick Bacchus (1593-1594)
4/ The colour of the bunch of grapes in the same painting
5/ The critical distance between the two apricots and the bowed sash resting on the pediment in the same painting
6/ The youthful innocence of the dupe in The Cardsharps (c. 1595)
7/ The deep, foreboding shadows under the eyes of Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness (1604-1605)
8/ The astonishingly beautiful skin tones in Gerrit van Honthorst’s Saint Sebastian (c. 1623) and how the blood from the leg wound at left runs in two directions: one direction when Saint Sebastian was standing up, one when he has slumped down. Inspired.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Kimbell Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the artwork in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Not since Michelangelo or Raphael had one artist affected so many of his contemporaries and so irrevocably changed the course of European painting. Caravaggio created a new kind of art: dramatic, deeply emotional, grounded in the vivid details of everyday life, and overwhelmingly human. He used live models, sometimes prostitutes and the very poor, who posed in the studio for his powerful religious scenes as if the events were happening on the streets of Rome. Breaking the boundaries between art and life, he overturned the artistic conventions of the day. He played down details of the setting of a scene, focused on the expressive human figure, and invented a brand of stark realism that shocked many of his patrons.”
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610) Saint Francis in Ecstasy c. 1594-1595 Oil on canvas Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610) The Gypsy Fortune Teller c. 1595 Oil on canvas 45 1/4 x 59 in. (115 x 150cm) Pinacoteca Capitolina, Musei Capitolini, Rome Public domain
One of the most influential figures in the history of art, Caravaggio (1571-1610) overturned the artistic conventions of the day and created stunningly dramatic paintings, both sacred and secular. This ambitious exhibition explores the profound impact of his work on the wide range of painters of Italian, French, Dutch, Flemish, and Spanish origin who resided in Rome. Arranged by theme, it includes over 50 paintings, with Caravaggio’s compelling images juxtaposed with those he inspired. This is the second largest display of his paintings in North America and only the third Caravaggio exhibition to be held in the United States.
Music and Youth
Many of Caravaggio’s early paintings feature handsome youths, whether singly or in groups. He seems to have used the same favorite models repeatedly – and sometimes his own features, which a contemporary tells us he studied in a mirror. The origins of these novel paintings lay in the types of pictures – portraits, still lifes, and allegories – that were painted in a realistic style in the artist’s native Lombardy, in the north of Italy, although he blurred the boundaries between genres to suggest real-life scenes. Caravaggio’s paintings of musicians would have appealed to Roman collectors who were passionate patrons of music, and likely were created to decorate rooms used for performances. They have a dreamy, slightly melancholy air. If the songs are about love, as we can assume they are, they are surely about the painful side of love rather than its joys. Caravaggio’s early paintings of youths are usually scenes of sensual pleasure but with a built-in warning against indulgence, as when a youth has his finger bitten by a lizard lurking in some fruit. He brings us close to his figures, often having them make eye contact with us, and includes lovingly observed still-life details that enhance the naturalism and immediacy of the scene. Even when there is a visitation from the beyond, like the winged Cupid in The Musicians, he treats this in a matter-of-fact way, attentive always to breaking down the boundaries between the painted world and our own. Caravaggio’s musical paintings caught on throughout Europe in the work of his followers, who brought their own innovations to the genre.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610) The Musicians c. 1595 Oil on canvas 36 1/4 x 46 5/8 in (92.1 x 118.4cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Rogers Fund, 1952
In this scene, Caravaggio shows some young musicians preparing for a concert. We are brought very close to the figures, as if we share the same space. Caravaggio breaks down the boundaries between art and life, and our reality and the painted world become entwined. The instruments are modern, but the musicians wear antique-inspired dress. The lute player tunes his instrument, and the horn player (possibly a self-portrait) catches our gaze. Another youth studies the musical score; it is no longer legible, but doubtless featured love madrigals. The winged Cupid with a quiver of arrows who is handling some grapes makes explicit the bond between music and love. Wine, like music, makes the spirits light. This painting belonged to Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, who hosted concerts at his palace and invited musicians to live in his household, along with artists like Caravaggio.
Theodoor Rombouts (Flemish, 1597-1637) A Lute Player c. 1620 Oil on canvas 43 7/8 x 39 1/4 in (111.1 x 99.7cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art. John G. Johnson Collection, 1917
Caravaggio’s paintings of musicians inspired Rombouts’s depiction of a musician tuning his lute. His intense expression suggests that he is both listening to the sound and sizing up the viewer, his audience. The vividly described carpet and still-life objects on the table recall Caravaggio’s similar close-up presentations. However, the colourful treatment of the costume and the robust delineation of the objects place Rombouts’s work within traditions of Flemish and Dutch painting. The still life, like ephemeral music, serves to remind us of the pleasures of life, but also that pleasure is fleeting. The artist also alludes to the five senses: hearing (the lute), taste (the tankard), smell (the pipe), sight (the musical scores), and touch (the knife).
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610) Boy Bitten by a Lizard 1594-1596 Oil on canvas 25 5/8 x 20 1/2 in (65 x 52cm) Fondazione di Studi di Storia dell’Arte Roberto Longhi, Florence
One of Caravaggio’s biographers wrote that “he also painted a boy bitten by a lizard emerging from flowers and fruits; you could almost hear the boy scream, and it was done meticulously.” The picture has suggested various interpretations. As an allegory of touch, it provides the basis for a study of how emotion is expressed physically, and arguably Caravaggio alludes to all the five senses (flowers as smell and so on). With the still life of fruits and roses, common emblems of love, he invokes age-old adages – pain can follow pleasure, and love is a rose with thorns that prick. Poets from Petrarch onward played on the similarity of the Italian words for “love” and “bitter” – amore and amaro – to which Caravaggio adds ramarro (lizard), ingeniously enlarging the joke.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610) Sick Bacchus 1593-1594 Oil on canvas Galleria Borghese, Rome
Cardsharps and Fortune Tellers
The young Caravaggio introduced another new kind of painting to the Roman art world with his scenes from the seamy side of life, its frauds and ruses. He painted these works on a large scale with half-length figures, and they were among his most widely imitated creations. His followers played countless variations on the same themes, trying various levels of subtlety and buffoonery in the humour and facial expressions. These highly animated compositions conjure up an underworld of wily cardsharps, soldiers of fortune, foolish dupes, sensuous and deceitful gypsy women, pickpockets, and thugs. They are based partly on everyday observations in the streets, partly on the stock characters and improvised comedies of the commedia dell’arte, partly on sheer fantasy. In such works, Caravaggio and his followers developed ingenious ways of involving us in the action. We read these amusingly moralising pictures through gestures and expressions – but to unravel the trickery takes time. Despite being frozen in a static image, the story seems to unfold before our eyes like one of the popular plays that were its inspiration. The artist extends the theme of deception by painting his subjects with such a high level of naturalism that the viewer is duped and astounded by his artistry.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610) The Cardsharps c. 1595 Oil on canvas 37 1/8 x 51 5/8 in (94.2 x 130.9cm) Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth
The players are engaged in a game of primero, a forerunner of poker. Engrossed in his cards, the dupe is unaware that the older cardsharp signals his accomplice, who reaches to pull a hidden card from his breeches. The fingertips of the cheat’s gloved hand are exposed to better feel marked cards. According to an early biographer, Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, a great patron of the arts, took the young Caravaggio into his household soon after purchasing this picture. It hung along with The Gypsy Fortune Teller in his palace. Together they would surely have reminded the cardinal and his guests of the story of the prodigal son, warning about the perils of greed and fraud. Caravaggio has treated this subject not as a caricature of vice but in a fresh way, in which the interaction of gesture and glance evokes the drama of deception and lost innocence in the most human of terms. He structures the picture to allow us to witness everything, implicating us in the trickery.
Saints
Caravaggio grounded his saints in everyday reality, indicating their spiritual states by means of natural phenomena, especially light. In his early painting of Saint Francis, he shows the saint’s ecstasy – his mystic identification with Christ – by directing a strong light upon his figure and the consoling angel. God’s grace is signalled by light in other images of the saints, such as the scene of Mary Magdalene’s conversion from her former life of sin. In paintings of Saints Matthew and Jerome in their studies, much emulated in Caravaggio’s circle, light is a metaphor of divine inspiration. Generally the saints seem to be emerging from darkness into light, which adds drama, symbolism, and also a sense of mass – as if they were sculpted, not merely painted. In a break from Roman and Florentine traditions, Caravaggio rejected the practice of refining his composition through drawings before he began to paint and instead worked directly from a live model in the studio, preserving that model’s particular appearance, never making the features or body conform to an ideal of beauty. The effect, central to Caravaggio’s art and that of many of his followers, was startling. At this time, many people believed that the painting of sacred personages such as saints called for a special, elevated style that set them apart from the mundane reality of the here and now. Caravaggio’s radical departure from this principle brought him much harsh criticism. He was accused of merely copying and so failing to capture a higher truth. But others recognised in his work a new kind of religious art that directly engaged the faithful and made old subjects new and alive.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610) Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness 1604-1605 Oil on canvas 68 x 52 in (172.7 x 132.1cm) The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Purchase William Rockhill Nelson Trust
Caravaggio’s practice of painting a live model in his studio brings this young, brooding saint to life – as if his image were inhabited by the model’s being. Ottavio Costa, a Roman banker, commissioned this painting for a chapel on a pilgrimage route in the countryside outside of Genoa, where his family had its origins. We can imagine what a powerful experience it would have been to encounter the image of the scarlet-robed saint there, dramatically emerging from the shadows into a strong light. When Caravaggio delivered the painting, Costa decided to keep it and placed a copy in the chapel. But even the copy proved inspiring. An early guide described how it “moves not only the members of the brotherhood but also visitors to penitence.”
Gerrit van Honthorst (Dutch, 1592-1656) Saint Sebastian c. 1623 Oil on canvas The National Gallery, London
The Sacred Narrative
Caravaggio was a masterful storyteller who could bring home the drama and significance of a biblical event with tremendous power. In his scenes from the Old and New Testaments, he created a new kind of painting – dramatic, even theatrical, yet grounded in the observation of ordinary reality – and it proved infectious among his contemporaries in Rome. His approach was to make the scene clear and simple, with the main actors in the drama seen close-up and caught in mid-action at a decisive moment, embodying the whole meaning of the event. He played down the setting, sometimes to the point that it is a mere pool of darkness from which the figures emerge. It was the actions and states of mind of the characters in the story that counted, and Caravaggio presented these with sometimes shocking directness and intensity, breaking all the rules of decorum that restrained more conventional painters. He mastered the art of concealing art, re-creating a scene with such a flavour of reality that it comes across as an eyewitness account. It was his power to draw viewers into the emotion and importance of a scene that made his work an essential object of study, even for such an independent genius as the great Peter Paul Rubens.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610) Martha and Mary Magdalene c. 1598 Oil and tempera on canvas 38 1/2 x 52 1/4 in (97.8 x 132.7cm) Detroit Institute of Arts. Gift of the Kresge Foundation and Mrs. Edsel B. Ford
Martha’s expressive hands, intensely illuminated, underscore her attempt to convert her sister Mary Magdalene from a life of worldly pleasures to one of spirituality. Several details recall Mary’s life of indulgence: the elegant dress, the ivory comb, the alabaster cosmetic jar. The mirror, a powerful symbol of vanity, becomes here an instrument reflecting the divine light that is penetrating Mary’s soul. Martha’s words seem to have been convincing, and her open mouth signals her amazement as she witnesses Mary’s transformation. The orange blossom in Mary’s right hand and the ring on her left indicate her new status as the blessed bride of Christ.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1571-1610) Sacrifice of Isaac 1602-1603 Oil on canvas 41 x 53 1/8 in (104 x 135cm) Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
Orazio Gentileschi (Italian, 1563-1639) Saint Francis in Ecstasy c. 1607 Oil on canvas 49 5/8 x 38 5/8 in. (126 x 98 cm) Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, 1577-1640) The Entombment c. 1612-1614 Oil on panel 34 3/4 x 26 1/8 in. (88.3 x 66.5 cm) National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa Purchased 1956 Public domain
Bartolomeo Manfredi (Italian, 1582-1622) David and Goliath (The Triumph of David) c. 1615 Oil on canvas 50 3/8 x 38 1/4 in. (128 x 97cm) Musée du Louvre, Paris Acquired in 1990
Jusepe de Ribera (Spanish, 1591-1652) Saints Peter and Paul c. 1616 Oil on canvas 49 5/8 x 44 1/8 in. (126 x 112cm) Musée des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg Public domain
Valentin de Boulogne (French, 1591-1632) Fortune Teller with Soldiers c. 1620 Oil on canvas 58 7/8 x 93 7/8 in. (149.5 x 238.5cm) Toledo Museum of Art Purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment. Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey Public domain
Valentin de Boulogne (French, 1591-1632) David with the Head of Goliath and Two Soldiers 1620-1622 Oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid Public domain
Bartolomeo Cavarozzi (Italian, 1587-1625) The Sorrows of Aminta c. 1625 Oil on canvas 39 3/8 x 47 1/4 in. (100 x 120cm) Musée du Louvre, Paris Gift of Paul Jamot, 1937 Public domain
Kimbell Art Museum 3333 Camp Bowie Boulevard, Fort Worth, TX 76107
Many thankx to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Since the early 1970s Haacke has taken on the intertwined political and corporate forces that use cultural patronage as a smokescreen to advance interests that are often antithetical to the vitality of free speech and expression in democracies. Haacke made this work just as the strategy of appropriation – lifting an image out of its original context and re-presenting it in critical fashion – began to make waves in the New York art world of the late 1970s. Like all effective appropriation, it exposes a prior instance of borrowing – in this case, how the investment firm Paine Webber used a documentary photograph to give its annual report the veneer of social concern. The artist then pointedly contrasted it with an image from the same annual report of a beaming trio of executives in a painting-lined gallery. As a counterpoint to the protestor’s signboard, Haacke dropped in text from a different Paine Webber ad campaign to show on whose backs the “risk management” is taking place – a biting indictment, the relevance of which has only increased since the recent economic downturn.
Wall’s staged tableaux straddle the worlds of the museum and the street. His subjects are scenes of urban and suburban disarray that he witnessed firsthand – the kinds of things anyone might see while wandering around a city and its outskirts. Working like a movie director, he restages the scene using nonprofessionals as actors and presents his photographs as colour transparencies in light boxes such as those of large-scale public advertisements found at airports and bus stops. The scale and ambition of his pictures – scenes of everyday life shot through with larger intimations of political struggle – equally evoke the Salon paintings of nineteenth century French painters such as Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, which were themselves brazen combinations of canonical and contemporary subjects.
The Storyteller is set in a barren, leftover slice of land next to a highway overpass in Vancouver, where the artist lives. Various groupings of modern urban castaways – perhaps descendants of the Native Americans who occupied the land before the arrival of Europeans – are dispersed around the hillside, a mini-catalogue of art-historical reference. Like the upside-down, half-submerged figure of Icarus in the background of Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, the woman speaking and gesticulating to the two men listening at the lower left becomes the key to unifying the fractured and alienating environment from which Wall’s picture is constructed.
The early 1990s marked the last moment when a wide swath of women artists responded to the sexism they saw as pervasive in the culture – from the rape trial of William Kennedy Smith to the Supreme Court nomination hearings for Clarence Thomas. A pioneer of set-up photography, Simmons dramatically expanded the scale of her constructed tableaux for a series of spotlighted puppet-like objects perched atop doll legs: revolvers, houses, cameras, and cakes. This armed and dangerous example refers to the old-movie cliché where a man carrying a gun is shown in shadow profile. Here, Simmons offers instead the death-dealing seductress – also familiar from film noir – in monumental miniature, a doll capable of turning on its master at a moment’s notice.
In the middle of the 1990’s, diCorcia gained international recognition for his large color photographs of street scenes and passersby. For an earlier series, he traveled to Los Angeles on a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and worked on a part of Santa Monica Boulevard frequented by male prostitutes and drug addicts. For each picture he made there, he carefully composed his setting, then asked young men to pose for him, giving them a small fee (from twenty to fifty dollars) that was negotiated each time.
At that time, NEA support of artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe was highly controversial, and diCorcia had to sign a document stating that he would not produce any “obscene” work while on his fellowship. He set up the whole negotiating procedure as a symbolic way of sharing his grant with people whose behavior would surely have been condemned by the censors. The titles always mention the name, the age and the origin of the model, as well as the amount paid. The staged situation interacts with the raw reality of the exchange of money, blurring the boundaries between documentary and fiction, yet preserving an authentic emotional charge.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection from March 22, 2011, through January 2, 2012, in the Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography. Drawn entirely from the Museum’s permanent collection, the exhibition features 25 photographs dating from 1979 to the present by 15 contemporary artists.
The exhibition’s title, After the Gold Rush, is taken from a classic 1970 song by Neil Young, whose verses contrast a romanticised past with a present of squandered plenty and an uncertain future. Inspired by the recent political and economic upheavals in America and abroad, this selection juxtaposes new photographs that take the long view of the world’s current condition with prescient works from the 1980s and 1990s that remain startlingly relevant today.
This is the first occasion for the Museum to present recently acquired works by: Gretchen Bender, James Casebere, Moyra Davey, Katy Grannan, Hans Haacke, An-My Lê, Curtis Mann, Trevor Paglen, and Wolfgang Tillmans. Also featured are photographs by: Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Robert Gober, Adrian Piper, Laurie Simmons, Jeff Wall, and Christopher Williams.
After the Gold Rush begins with Hans Haacke’s Thank You, Paine Webber (1979) – the first work by this legendary provocateur of Conceptual art to enter the Metropolitan’s collection. Haacke’s biting photo-diptych is so pertinent to the recent economic downturn that it seems as if it could have been made yesterday. In this work, the artist appropriated images from the investment firm’s annual report to convey his viewpoint that big business provides a veneer of social concern to mask the brutal effects of the “risk management” they offer their clients.
Other works in After the Gold Rush use varying degrees of artifice and photographic realism to reflect on marginalised and repressed voices. Measuring over 14 feet long and presented as a backlit transparency in a light box, The Storyteller (1986) is Jeff Wall’s signature image and is typical of his method. Working from memory, the artist uses nonprofessional actors and real locations to meticulously restage a scene of urban blight that he witnessed in his native Vancouver. Wall plays this photographic verisimilitude against compositions and figural poses indebted to French painters such as Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, and Georges Seurat. A comparison of Wall’s Storyteller with Courbet’s Young Ladies of the Village (1852), on view in the Museum’s galleries for Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century European Paintings and Sculpture, reveals parallels: in both, a keenly observed moment of telling social interaction taking place on a sloping landscape. Each artist has combined a daringly modern subject with references to earlier art.
Philip-Lorca diCorcia is another key figure in the development of staged photography. In the early 1990s, the artist created a series of works in response to the political attacks on gays and federal funding of the arts in the U.S. DiCorcia hired male hustlers to pose for their portraits out on the streets – and paid them with grant money he received from the National Endowment for the Arts. At the same moment, a wide swath of women artists addressed issues of sexism and racism: examples of this politically pointed art are represented by Laurie Simmons’ Walking Gun (1991) – a spotlighted puppet of doll legs and a revolver that seems capable of turning on its master at a moment’s notice – and Adrian Piper’s 1992 work Decide Who You Are #24 (A Moving Target), which includes a childhood image of Anita Hill as part of a blistering meditation in word and image on racial politics. Such works are missives from a time not so long ago when artists regularly commented on present-day politics and culture through their art. (Because of light sensitivity, this work by Adrian Piper will be on view through Sunday, September 26.)
Although the recently made photographs in After the Gold Rush seem at first glance to be less overtly political than their predecessors, they nevertheless address vital issues about contemporary society. James Casebere’s epic vision of America, Landscape with Houses (Dutchess County, NY) #1, (2009), is based on a tabletop model that the artist spent 18 months building. The photograph shows a suburban subdivision of the kind recently ravaged by the foreclosure crisis, and its sunny sense of “Morning in America” comments ironically on the country’s future prospects. An-My Lê’s similarly sweeping five-part photographic piece Suez Canal Transit, USS Dwight Eisenhower, Egypt (2009) will also be featured. Lê is interested in the way in which U.S. armed forces come into contact with the rest of the world. This major new work – which seems at first to be a straightforward panorama of military might overseas – subtly undercuts the viewer’s expectations to question the current position of the U.S. on the global stage.
Trevor Paglen is a young artist whose works plot the “black world” of covert military operations, from telephoto images of predator drones taken from miles away, to software that follows planes used for the extraordinary rendition of suspected terrorists. Paglen’s 2008 photograph KEYHOLE IMPROVED CRYSTAL from Glacier Point (Optical Reconnaissance Satellite; USA 186) shows the ghostly white streak of an American reconnaissance satellite bisecting star trails above Yosemite’s Half Dome, a rock formation photographed in the 1860s by artists including Carleton Watkins. To make these and other photographs, Paglen collaborated with amateur astronomers who were originally trained by the U.S. government to look out for Soviet satellites during the Cold War, but turned their attention to American surveillance in recent years.
The final piece in After the Gold Rush is a suite of five recently acquired photographs from 2007-2009 by the celebrated photographer Wolfgang Tillmans. The grouping shifts focus from macro to micro: from expansive aerial views of Shanghai and Dubai to close ups that suggest the smallest increments of sustenance and regeneration. Taken together, they evoke the interconnectedness of all things and a grounding of the political in the personal as a way for an engaged yet expressive art.
Press release from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
It was in 1990 – at the height of a worldwide economic recession that also marked the end of the 1980s art bubble – that Davey began photographing the scratched, worn-away surfaces of pennies, the most devalued and lowest form of currency. Her accumulation of one hundred micro-photographic specimens is constructed around the readymade patterns of decay that countless anonymous owners have unconsciously wrought upon their surfaces; their base materiality is incisively contrasted with the most elevated of national symbols. As with all of Davey’s work, there is a melancholic sense of loss that connects subject and form: like pennies, photographs are objects of exchange imprinted by contact with the world around them.
Piper is an artist and a philosophy professor who works in a variety of media, including performance, video, sound pieces, photography, drawing, and writing. She often explores issues of autobiography, racism, and stereotyping. For her 1992 series Decide Who You Are, the artist used a triptych format in which a different appropriated photograph is flanked by an image of the “three wise monkeys” maxim advocating “See No Evil, Speak No Evil, Hear No Evil” at left, and at right a photograph of a young girl who, though not identified, is Anita Hill – who had recently been thrust into the spotlight for accusing then-nominee for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. The verse in the left panel changes in each individual work in the series, while that on the right is unchanging – what the artist once described as “a comprehensive, textbook compendium of commonly invoked litanies of denial and intimidation, from the bland to the vaguely menacing” and “a must for novices and aspiring leaders in business, politics, and culture.”
Robert Gober works primarily in sculpture, installations, and photography. He is perhaps best known for his delicate, ghostly hand crafted versions of domestic fixtures, such as drains, beds, doors, and sinks. Through these uncanny replicas, Gober invests mass produced objects with personal meaning – the private, unruly desires and memories of the individual. This image appeared in the book (his first in the genre) that Gober created to accompany his installation representing the United States at the 2000 Venice Biennale. In it, the artist interweaves his own journey to New York in 1978 as a young gay man with the toxic fallout of homophobic recrimination that accompanied the murder of the Wyoming college student Matthew Shepard twenty years later.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Robert Gober superimposes a man’s hand between two newspaper articles, clipped neatly and placed on a shell-strewn beach. Below his hand, the article refers to Matthew Shepard’s death. Above it, a letter to the editor argues that “Orthodox Jews, conservative Christians and others have a right to speak out against homosexuality without being placed in the category of thuggery.” While the piece obviously precedes Jonathan Rauch’s provocative and important piece in the December issue of the Advocate arguing that gay people should tolerate a certain amount of anti-gay sentiment as a sign that they’re legally and socially secure enough to practice tolerance, it’s a useful encapsulation of the dilemma behind that argument. It’s hard to cast off past threats if you’re not entirely sure they’re past.
Trained as a geographer, Paglen is an artist who plots the topography of a new global and celestial space – the “black world” of covert military operations. Examples of his subjects include the supposed sites used for the extraordinary rendition of prisoners, which he shoots with specially designed cameras from up to forty miles away, and the network of private planes used to transport them under the radar. This image shows the ghostly white streak of an American reconnaissance satellite bisecting star trails above Yosemite’s Half Dome, a rock formation photographed in the 1860s by the photographer Carleton Watkins when the West was still being explored. In order to track such spacecraft, Paglen uses a database created by amateur astronomers who were trained by the U.S. government to search the skies for Soviet sputniks but continued their hobby after the end of the Cold War by tracking our own satellites. In this work, the artist brings into one composition two historically disparate moments in geographic and celestial colonisation.
Many thankx to The Denver Art Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Burning oil sludge, north of Denver, Colorado 1973-1974 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) North of Keota, Colorado 1973 printed 1989
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Mobile home park, north edge of Denver, Colorado 1973-1974 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
The Denver Art Museum (DAM) is the first U.S. venue for Robert Adams: The Place We Live, A Retrospective Selection of Photographs. The exhibition features more than 200 black-and-white photos spanning Adams’s 45-year career, showcasing the artistic legacy of the American photographer and his longstanding engagement with the contemporary Western landscape. Adams lived and worked in Colorado for nearly 30 years. Many of his most acclaimed images were taken in the Rocky Mountain region and will strike a familiar chord with visitors. The exhibition, organised by the Yale University Art Gallery, will be on view September 25, 2011 – January 1, 2012 in the museum’s Gallagher Family Gallery.
“We’re excited to host the work of one of the foremost photographers of our time,” said Eric Paddock, the DAM’s curator of photography. “Robert Adams’s striking yet quiet photos provoke thought about current economic, political and environmental issues Westerners confront every day. We think visitors will see something very familiar in his work.”
Since becoming a photographer in the mid-1960s, Adams has been widely regarded as one of the most significant and influential chroniclers of the American West. Adams’s photographs and writing insist that the realities of everyday landscapes are as beautiful as idealised scenes from nature. They ask questions about the ways people change and interact with nature, and what it means to live simply and quietly in today’s world. This commitment earned Adams prominence in photography’s “New Topographics” movement of the late 20th century and lends authority to his ongoing work. His photographs of Colorado suburban growth and clear cut forests in the Pacific Northwest, for example, express shock at mainstream social and economic values.
“The Denver Art Museum is pleased to be the first U.S. venue for The Place We Live, showcasing our continued commitment to our photography program,” said Christoph Heinrich, Frederick and Jan Mayer Director of the DAM. “Colorado has a rich photography history and we’re excited to have visitors engage with these artworks that provide a narrative to the American experience and take a fresh look at their surroundings.”
Featuring more than 200 gelatin silver prints, The Place We Live weaves together four decades of Adam’s work into a cohesive, epic narrative of American experience in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Each of the photographer’s major projects is represented, from early pictures of quiet buildings and monuments erected by prior settlers of his native Colorado to his most recent images of forests and migratory birds in the Pacific Northwest.
Biography
Born in Orange, N.J., in 1937, Robert Adams moved with his family from Madison, Wis., to Denver, Colo., at the age of 15. He earned a doctorate degree from the University of Southern California and, intent on pursuing an academic career, returned to Colorado in 1962 as an assistant professor of English at Colorado College. Disturbed by the rapid transformation of the Colorado Springs and Denver areas, Adams began photographing a landscape transformed by tract housing, highways, strip malls and gas stations. “The pictures record what we purchased, what we paid and what we could not buy,” Adams wrote. “They document a separation from ourselves, and in turn from the natural world that we professed to love.” Since 1997, he has lived and worked in Oregon.”
Press release from The Denver Art Museum
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Lakewood, Colorado 1968-1971 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) In a New Subdivision, Colorado Springs, Colorado 1969 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Frame for a Tract House, Colorado Springs, Colorado 1969 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Pikes Peak, Colorado Springs, Colorado 1969 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Denver, Colorado c. 1970 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Longmont, Colorado 1973-1974, printed 2007 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Eden, Colorado 1968 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Colorado Springs, Colorado 1968 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from Trellis Fund, and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Edge of San Timoteo Canyon, looking toward Los Angeles, Redlands, California 1978 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Quarried Mesa Top, Pueblo County, Colorado 1978 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery Purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from Trellis Fund, and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Longmont, Colorado 1979, printed 1985 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Santa Ana Wash, Redlands, California 1983, printed 1991 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
Robert Adams (American, b. 1937) Sitka spruce, Cape Blanco State Park, Curry County, Oregon 1999-2000 Gelatin silver print Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Saundra B. Lane, a grant from the Trellis Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund
The Denver Art Museum Civic Center Cultural Complex Located on 13th Avenue between Broadway and Bannock in downtown Denver
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